Measuring customer innovativeness via FuzzyART network modeling

Many attempts to bridge innovation and creating market opportunity fail due to a company's incompetence to cross the chasm—the diffusion transition between the embryonic market where customers are innovators/early adopters and the profitable mass market where customers are early majority/later majority. However, the extant body of literature address the why but not the how. This paper thus presents the research method incorporating the approach of customer knowledge management (CKM) to shed light on how to tackle the challenge. The process of CKM not only but delineates the executable procedure how to gain an insight into customer response to an innovative product, also employs several quantitative methods as the benchmarking tools for the peer-to-peer evaluation in a multiple-assessment scheme. It does so to justify the effectiveness of a less-used unsupervised clustering tool, the FuzzyART network model, against other conventional methods. In addition, the exercise of the CKM process in an industrial level Telematics case study further confirms its potential as an approach of novelty in the context of marketing the innovative products and services.